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Monday, 28 April 2014

Thoughts on suicide/trans identity/dysphoria/gender passing/race passing/abuse/the ancestors/disability/trauma/crying/I want to come up with something interesting to write about suicide but I feel sick so I'm just going to paste another DFW quote k?

"A level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it

a double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible

Monday, 7 April 2014

"Like if you grew
up in ourneighbourhood the idea was you weren’t
supposed to show any vulnerability, the one place that you were permitted to show vulnerability was in a
women’s bed. Which, you know, lead to
all sorts of behavior, The other thing was that a lot of the guys I grew up
with,there had been a lot of sexual abuse, there had been a lot of incest, I
mean, you know, a lot of the guys had
gotten raped, usually by family members and a lot of the, kind of, compulsive fucking around, I think, was powered in
part, not only by masculine privilege in a
culture that doesn’t punish guys if they fuck around, but was also powered by
these, kind of deep traumas. I mean one
of the reactions of being raped or
being, you know, sexually assaulted is hyper sexualization. And you think about
the way masculine culture works that
encourages hyper sexualization, it’s no accident that a lot of guys who had been sexually attacked, who
had been raped, you know, who are incest survivors
would, sort of, deploy that as a way of compensating, as a way of dealing,
as a way of, sort of, trying to contain the
pain. So, I guess, for me that also was one of the big things, you know. A lot of the cheating that went on in my
friends groups, we victimized so many
people because of it, you know, and I think that simultaneous to any traumas that we experienced the truth is we
also victimized a ton of people. You know?
You have got to be able to hold both simultaneous, you can’t be like, “Oh
boo-hoo-hoo me.” Because you know it
sucks, but a lot of us who had been victimized spread that misery out really far man. So, you know, it’s funny
because I have written three books and
in each book Yunior comes to revealing that he was raped but never comes out and says it. And it’s, sort of, like the
way boys, the difficulty boys have in
integrating that into their identity, especially a guy like Yunior who doesn’t
want to abandon, sort of, this kind of
classic masculinity that has given him so much privilege. You know? You come close and close but you don’t… I am
thinking maybe by the next book I will be
able to have him deal with it."